See, I am on the promo list of a few labels, including this label, Andante Music, out of Ukraine.

Yesterday I received a new promo from them which quite caught my ear — Ceo Basso‘s People In The Hop EP — and while adding that release to the rest of the label’s 10 releases so far, I realized their output was quite interesting when taken as whole: I guess you call that good artistic direction.

In any case, I thought I’d give a go at making a mix featuring only releases from the label, figuring it certainly can’t hurt a small start-up label from Ukraine to get a little more exposure here!

So here’s the result. You’ll notice there aren’t that many different artists, but all of the label’s artists (so far) are represented except one, which I felt didn’t quite fit with the overall mood of the mix.

As for Ceo Basso, who figures prominently on the mix, he’s definitely the most accomplished of the lot and although information about him or that label is hard to come by, my hunch is he’s the guy behind the label.

So here goes, friends, discover the sound of Ukraine, Deep House on the minimal tip, but never cold!

You can stream this mix from my Soundcloud page or download it here. In the tracklist below, the link on the name of each artist will take you to the corresponding release on Beatport.

I have no clue as to how I managed to not be aware of that release since Fred is a friend and I’m the #1 Bran Van fan!

In any case, I fell in love with the main remix and, by it’s very structure, it became clear it had to be the closer of a new mix it inspired me to record.

Normally, I will make a selection of tracks I’m feeling at the moment, settle on the opener and work from there.

In this case, then, I had a closer, so I worked my way backwards until I felt I had a good opener that would build up to the closer I had chosen. Intellectually, it was a fun process and I’m utterly pleased with the result!

Now, some of you may or may not know it, but Jack is my son who I only get to see every other weekend, except in the summer, and this summer I got to see a lot of him, but summer is (almost) over and I will see less of him until at least the end of October, and all I could think of while recording this mix was him, hence the tagline…

First in a two-part mix series covering Brian Eno’s solo career to celebrate the launch of his new album in collaboration to Karl Hyde. This first part covers the 90s and 2000s in chronological order, one or more track per major release of his.